Sleeping in the buff

Last night we dressed Cooper in his Handy Manny separates pajamas.  He fell asleep on his own (which he does regularly now) and he also sleeps through the night (7 pm to 5 or 6 am)—yay!  Anyhow, the point is that he knows how to undress himself when he wears separates versus zip up jammies (we use a safety pin on the zipper otherwise he gets out of those too).

He went to sleep at 7 pm and I went to bed late at 11:30 pm.  I checked the video monitor, and what do I see?  Cooper laying there with no pants, no diaper, holding himself.  Apparently he didn’t fall right to sleep!

Now I had to debate whether to go get him or just let him keep sleeping.  I decided the pee would be a bit much if I didn’t put a diaper on him, so I went in to his room.  I was able to get a diaper on and his pj pants on without him waking up!  Of course there was pee all over the place!  At least he woke up a couple hours later and needed some attention, so Chris changed his bedding and I nursed him a bit.  He fell right back to sleep.  Crazy kid likes to sleep in the buff.

Charlotte had her occupation and physical evaluation.  It was almost 2 hours long and they had her do several types of play and exercise.  She does great at stacking blocks and picking several of them up in her hands.  She is very advanced with playing with a ball since she can even catch a ball.  She eats with utensils very well and properly holds a writing utensil.  This was a big deal since this usually isn’t something a child can do until age 3.

The areas she is behind is getting dressed/undressed (apparently she should be stripping naked like Cooper does all the time), tossing a ball underhand, pretend play (she wouldn’t pretend to stir beans in a bowl, there had to be toy beans for her to show them she could stir), running (she walks fast) and she is weak in her extremities, particularly her upper body.  She is also weaker on her left side than her right side.

The good news is that they don’t think she is far enough behind on any skill to need therapy.  They plan to give us exercises and games to play with her to get her closer to her age and prevent her from falling further behind.  An example is getting her to step on stairs starting with her left foot, doing wheelbarrows and having her walk on her hands, and practicing picking things up using tongs (to strengthen her grip).

The other great news is that they don’t think she is quite as far delayed behaviorally as the originally assessed a couple weeks ago.  They said after spending more time with her during this session, they think she was likely going through a rough patch due to learning more expressive language.  Instead of 6 hours of therapy, we probably will only do 2 or less.

She is also starting to make some significant progress in her speech.  She now says ‘dow’ for down unprompted when she wants down from her booster seat (putting 2 sounds together, plus skipping the whining/crying to get our attention).  She also says ‘daddeee’ when she is done with nap, rather than crying.  She has also started saying ‘daddeee’ at other times to get our attention rather than grunting/whining/tantrums.  She says ‘ohh’ for ‘more’ too (she is supposed to at least get one sound for the word she is attempting to say, so this is progress, especially since she used to not even be able to say ‘oh’).  It feels great to know that she is making progress and she isn’t delayed in every area.